The Iranian elementary school strike
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At the beginning of the American and Israeli war against Iran, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck an elementary school, killing 175 people or more, children, and presumably teachers, staff and parents. The Trump administration denied American involvement; an internal Department of Defense investigation subsequently confirmed it. Kiriakou's summary judgement is short: "This should never have happened, Ted. Never have happened."

Why it happened

The targeting data listed the site as a Revolutionary Guards facility. It had been converted into a school somewhere between 2013 and 2016, "10 to 13 years ago", and the data was never revised. Kiriakou reaches immediately for the precedent: "See, this is how we accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Right? Because the targeting information is often wrong, rarely updated appropriately."

He sets against that the procedure that exists precisely to catch it. An analyst is expected "to not just check, double check, triple check" but to send the product to other offices to repeat the exercise, "to make sure you don't do things like blow up a girl's school and kill all the children inside." Updating the file would have required little: "look at a satellite photo and see if there are children there playing in the yard."

The distinction he insists on is between precision and knowledge. Against the argument that a military able to put a bomb through a window does not hit a school by accident, his answer separates the two capabilities: "let's not conflate accuracy... by GPS with, we could definitely hit the target. The question is, do we know what the target is?"

Denial and accountability

Kiriakou treats the president's public line as the tell. Trump had said that anyone could have a Tomahawk cruise missile; Kiriakou notes that "in fact only the US, the UK, and Australia, and Japan have them", and that when the denial is that loose, "you know that nobody's going to face any kind of punishment." Asked whether there would be accountability inside the system, his answer is one word: "No."

He expects recurrence because there is precedent: "Just like it happened in the Kosovo War, it happened in the Gulf War. It happens every time we have an armed conflict with some other country. And then we're like, 'Oh, our bad. Yeah. Too bad about that. Sorry.'" He does not think the school was hit deliberately.

On the claim that 5,000 targets had been struck, he declines to treat the number as information: "that's a statistic that doesn't mean anything. Cuz what's a target? A target could be a garage where there might or might not be a Jeep inside. We can call anything we want a target."

See also

- Defense Intelligence Agency
- Targeting analyst
- 2026 Iran war
